It’s been a long time since I’ve felt a blood sugar that was low but not as low as the 30’s and low 40’s. I have hypoglycemia unawareness. I don’t feel my low blood sugars generally. And typically, if I feel my low blood sugars, it’s not so much a feeling so much as it is me seeing something. And by seeing them, I mean that I actually watch my vision tunnel. That’s the one lone symptom that I notice.
Other people can pick up on my lows based on my response times to questions or my suddenly argumentative demeanor and lack of understanding when just moments before I had been fine. Or sometimes I’ll just ramble on and on about nothing at all and I’ll quickly be jumping from one thought to another. Well, okay, that’s not always a symptom, it’s fairly normal; but special peeps with special skillz can pick up on when my persistent rambling is the result of a low blood sugar.
All this to say that unless my blood sugar is <45 or someone else catches it, the only thing catching my lows is my every 2 hour blood checks or my continuous glucose monitor (CGM). None of which are ideal situations. However, because of my severely erratic blood sugars and the overwhelming number of lows I experience (I’d venture to say that I have at least 1 a day) I’ve lost the symptoms to my lows a long time ago. Oh, I just thought of another one. About the time my vision is tunneling, my lips and tongue start to tingle in an atrociously irritating way.
So now, I take you to the last day of Diabetes Training Camp when we were sitting in a circle sharing our highlights of the week. Before we sat down we had locked arms and KR noticed my very sweaty hands and asked if I was low. At that point my blood sugar was 98. A perfectly normal blood sugar. So as we’re sitting there and as time is passing and stories are being told, my blood sugar is dropping. But, because the alarms on my CGM are turned off, I was unaware of what my blood sugars were doing. That was, until my head became very very light and my eyelids became very very heavy.
I sat there on the floor for a bit feeling these feelings. At one point, I had a thought that if I didn’t get up, I wasn’t going to be able to get up at all. My entire body was becoming as though it were a lead weight. I waiting until the person speaking was through and worked hard to get up (I really wanted to crawl).
I went to my backpack and sat down only to realize that my meter was at the table. I grabbed my bottle of glucose tabs and again fought to get up to get to my meter. This time, I sat in a chair. I didn’t last long there.
I desperately tried to get my fingers dried because the first finger prick didn’t lend to the beading of blood, it just flattened out and ran over my finger (this is only normal when I’ve exited the pool). When I finally got my blood checked, I was 60. WTF!?! What I was feeling for that blood sugar was so far from normal that I didn’t know what to think. I grabbed the glucose tabs and poured half of them into my sweaty hands. As I began eating them, I knew I was going to fall out of the chair so I slumped to the ground, laid down and continued to shove glucose tabs into my mouth.
I was lying there, on the floor, my legs bent at my knees and they began to shake. I clench the muscles to try to hold them still but it wasn’t happening. I think if I had to compare it to something, I’d say that it was like trying to support a structure such that it wouldn’t move or even wiggle the slightest bit in an earthquake. Being that way, I straightened out my legs and let them continue to shake and laid there with my hands on my belly, my shirt soaking up my sweat My mind was void of my own thoughts and I was listening to all the peeps talk of their highlights of the week.
At that point, I had probably eaten between 12-15 glucose tabs. It was seriously half the bottle. That’s a lot in case you’re wondering. The next thing to happen was me getting nauseous. I don’t do well with being nauseated when I’m not low. Being low compounded my issue with nausea. There was no way I was going to be able to get up from the floor if I had to vomit. At that moment in time, I was not in a good place at all.
I continued to lie there and mentally tried to will the nausea away. And then, I started to shiver. But it wasn’t a shiver because I was cold shiver. No, this shiver, I don’t know what it was, but it was fierce enough to make my teeth chatter.
That was my low, I was all of 60 and I didn’t like feeling it, not one bit. I really don’t want to ever feel anything like that ever again.
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